“As there is no other man for you, Kate,” he said, “so there is no other woman for me. We must go through the world alone.” “Is this my punishment?” “It is the punishment of both, Kate, the punishment of both alike.” Kate stopped her breathing. Her clenched hands slackened away from his neck, and she stepped back from him, shuddering with remorse, and despair, and shame. She saw herself now for the first time a fallen woman. Never before had her sin touched her soul. It was at that moment she fell. They had come up to the cave by this time, and she sat on the stone at the mouth of it in a great outburst of weeping. It tore his heart to hear her. The voice of her weeping was like the distressful cry of the slaughtered lamb. He had to wrestle with himself not to take her in his arms and comfort her. The fit of tears spent itself at length, and after a time she drew a great breath and was quiet. Then she lifted her face, and the last gleam of the autumn sun smote her colourless lips and swollen eyes. When she spoke again, it was like one speaking in her sleep, or under the spell of somebody who had magnetised her. “It is wrong of me to think so much of myself, as if that were everything. I ought to feel sorry for you too. You must be driven to it, or you could never be so cruel.” With his face to the sea, he mumbled something about Pete, and she caught up the name and said, “Yes, and Pete too. As you think it would be wrong to Pete, I will not hold to you. Oh, it will be wrong to me as well! But I will not give you the pain of turning a deaf ear to my troubles any more.” She was struggling with a pitiless hope that perhaps she might regain him after all. “If I give him up,” she thought, “he will love me for it;” and then, with a sad ring in her voice, she said, “You will go on and be a great man now, for you'll not have me to hold you back.” “For pity's sake, say no more of that,” he said, but she paid no heed. “I used to think it a wonderful thing to be loved by a great man. I don't now. It is terrible. If I could only have you to myself! If you could only be nothing to anybody else! You would be everything to me, and what should I care then?”